Ferragus | Page 8

the eyes of a man see very clearly.
Strange, weird, inconceivable effects may be met with at night in Paris.
Only those who have amused themselves by watching those effects
have any idea how fantastic a woman may appear there at dusk. At
times the creature whom you are following, by accident or design,
seems to you light and slender; the stockings, if they are white, make
you fancy that the legs must be slim and elegant; the figure though
wrapped in a shawl, or concealed by a pelisse, defines itself gracefully
and seductively among the shadows; anon, the uncertain gleam thrown
from a shop-window or a street lamp bestows a fleeting lustre, nearly
always deceptive, on the unknown woman, and fires the imagination,
carrying it far beyond the truth. The senses then bestir themselves;
everything takes color and animation; the woman appears in an
altogether novel aspect; her person becomes beautiful. Behold! she is
not a woman, she is a demon, a siren, who is drawing you by magnetic
attraction to some respectable house, where the worthy /bourgeoise/,
frightened by your threatening step and the clack of your boots, shuts
the door in your face without looking at you.
A vacillating gleam, thrown from the shop-window of a shoemaker,
suddenly illuminated from the waist down the figure of the woman who
was before the young man. Ah! surely, /she/ alone had that swaying
figure; she alone knew the secret of that chaste gait which innocently
set into relief the many beauties of that attractive form. Yes, that was
the shawl, and that the velvet bonnet which she wore in the mornings.
On her gray silk stockings not a spot, on her shoes not a splash. The
shawl held tightly round the bust disclosed, vaguely, its charming lines;
and the young man, who had often seen those shoulders at a ball, knew

well the treasures that the shawl concealed. By the way a Parisian
woman wraps a shawl around her, and the way she lifts her feet in the
street, a man of intelligence in such studies can divine the secret of her
mysterious errand. There is something, I know not what, of quivering
buoyancy in the person, in the gait; the woman seems to weigh less; she
steps, or rather, she glides like a star, and floats onward led by a
thought which exhales from the folds and motion of her dress. The
young man hastened his step, passed the woman, and then turned back
to look at her. Pst! she had disappeared into a passage-way, the grated
door of which and its bell still rattled and sounded. The young man
walked back to the alley and saw the woman reach the farther end,
where she began to mount--not without receiving the obsequious bow
of an old portress--a winding staircase, the lower steps of which were
strongly lighted; she went up buoyantly, eagerly, as though impatient.
"Impatient for what?" said the young man to himself, drawing back to
lean against a wooden railing on the other side of the street. He gazed,
unhappy man, at the different storeys of the house, with the keen
attention of a detective searching for a conspirator.
It was one of those houses of which there are thousands in Paris,
ignoble, vulgar, narrow, yellowish in tone, with four storeys and three
windows on each floor. The outer blinds of the first floor were closed.
Where was she going? The young man fancied he heard the tinkle of a
bell on the second floor. As if in answer to it, a light began to move in a
room with two windows strongly illuminated, which presently lit up the
third window, evidently that of a first room, either the salon or the
dining-room of the apartment. Instantly the outline of a woman's
bonnet showed vaguely on the window, and a door between the two
rooms must have closed, for the first was dark again, while the two
other windows resumed their ruddy glow. At this moment a voice said,
"Hi, there!" and the young man was conscious of a blow on his
shoulder.
"Why don't you pay attention?" said the rough voice of a workman,
carrying a plank on his shoulder. The man passed on. He was the voice
of Providence saying to the watcher: "What are you meddling with?
Think of your own duty; and leave these Parisians to their own affairs."
The young man crossed his arms; then, as no one beheld him, he
suffered tears of rage to flow down his cheeks unchecked. At last the

sight of the shadows moving behind the lighted windows gave him
such pain that he looked elsewhere and noticed a hackney-coach,
standing against a wall in the upper part of the rue des Vieux-Augustins,
at a place where there